It is not often you can say a website has changed the face of the web, and had an impact far beyond the confines of its own domain. But, for many, Blogger is such a site.

For a little over two years now, Blogger ) has brought its "Push button publishing for the people" to the net, making it easy for net users to create simple, easily updated websites. In doing so, it has brought the kind of vibrant discussion previously seen on the net's chatboards to an area previously noted only for its dormancy - the personal homepage. Better still, you can use it for free. It's used on around 400,000 websites - and it is run by one person, Evan Williams.

Blogger, which he and a small team launched in August 1999, did not invent the web log or "blog" - a frequently updated, diary-like commentary usually filled with links to other websites. Nor is Blogger the only way to create a blog - there are desktop applications that can do a similar job. But it has made the act of "blogging" much simpler by automating many of the most time-consuming and difficult stages of publishing a website. Because Blogger runs on a central web server you do not need special software on your computer to use it. That means people can add to their site from anywhere that has an internet connection.

So, for hundreds of thousands of homepages, it has been goodbye to little more than a CV and pet pictures, and hello to what has been called "personal journalism". Weblogs have been gathering momentum for years, but September 11 last year was when blogging came of age, when thousands of individual posts provided a multitude of perspectives. Some authors simply described where they were, what they were doing, as the twin towers fell. New York bloggers told their networks of family and friends they were safe. Others were serving up strikingly perceptive analysis while the TV networks were still struggling to digest what had happened (see panel, page 3).

All Blogger.com's records were broken that day, and the site's membership has been growing rapidly since, with an average of 1,000 weblogs being created every day. But, as it tends to do on the internet, success has brought Blogger to a crossroads. The huge number of people wanting to make use of its tools have placed a huge burden on the service, and now Blogger needs to start making some real money.

For all its success, Blogger is a tiny operation. After a financial crisis a year ago, and despite a successful public appeal for funds to buy new servers, Evan Williams ended up the service's only member of staff: co-founder, chief executive and programmer, rolled into one. Working from his apartment in the Noe Valley suburb of San Francisco, Williams spent most of last year attempting to hold the service together - sometimes without success - as its popularity soared. Yet, aside from a deal to license Blogger technology, the main source of revenue for the service comes from BlogSpot, where bloggers pay $12 a year not to have adverts on their pages.

Now, sitting in a sunny coffee shop near his home, the 29 year-old is hoping Blogger's days of scraping enough money together to survive are about to end. With a contract programmer now recruited to develop new services, it is time to try and make Blogger pay, through a new version called Blogger Pro that has been talked about for two years, but which only launched last weekend.

"I don't want to take away the free version," says Williams. "Although I'm convinced that if we took away the free Blogger and told everybody 'you have to pay x amount', a big enough percentage of people would stay to make it sustainable.

"But it's also very important for me that it has as large an impact as possible, and I'm still very much a believer in the tiered approach. There is also loads of stuff we want to build and have been talking about building. But we can't add for free."

Now, Blogger Pro users can enjoy new services for $30 a year. That will rise to $60 as more gets added. What will be those new features, I ask? "It's not going to be very exciting - servers that respond, at first," he says, laughing.

"People have been getting so frustrated, especially in the last few days, and the free servers will eventually be responding quickly as well. But the first thing is just to get a faster and more reliable service, but that will also give us the platform on which we can add the new features."

The frustration has partly been caused by Blogger's popularity, which has reduced the speed of the service to a crawl in recent months. But it has also been caused by Blogger's first serious hacker attack, which happened on Christmas Day and eventually took the service completely out of action while Williams scrambled to carry out repairs - over a humble telephone line connection from his parents' house in Des Moines, Iowa.

"It put a damper on my Christmas, to say the least," he says. "I'd had a few messages from people in the security business and it seemed that quite a few sites got hacked on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, to cause as much havoc as possible. But I guess if your purpose is to annoy and be malicious, it makes sense that they'd choose the most annoying time."

Williams got the service fixed, partly thanks - again - to the weblog community's help: local users pointed him in the direction of a fast internet connection at a nearby cybercafe. But not all of his "customers" are so understanding: Blogger's frequent downtime has led to some ferocious emails from users.

"I got a really nasty email today from someone who said they used Blogger," says Williams. "I can't even repeat most of the stuff they said. People like that I don't feel so bad about - like 'oh, darn, I'm not paying to subsidise their web publishing anymore'.

"But most people have been really nice, very understanding about it all, and it's those people I feel under pressure to give this power to. I get sick to my stomach when it's down... I know how frustrating it is when you've got used to using something, and it's not working for you. It kills me when so many people like it and have become dependent on it."

And the drive for greater reliability is a big reason behind the drive towards a subscription service. "The big thing at the moment is to make it all more sustainable, so that it's not 24/7 pressure," says Williams, who admits to only enjoying "sporadic" sleep when Blogger is misbehaving.

But while improved reliability will be the central part of Blogger Pro, as it is now known, the plans for other enhancements give an idea of how Williams sees weblogging - and, by extension, the web - developing.

The first set of improvements makes Blogger more flexible, adding things like spell checking and a better way for users to archive their posts. Still to come are much-requested features such as built-in commenting - through which readers can leave their comments - and the ability to post additions to weblogs via email.

"Those are a lot of the obvious things we pictured as Pro since we started talking about it," says Williams. "But the bigger idea is to take advantage of the fact that it is a centralised service.

"What we haven't done much of, and what I think is desperately needed in the blogging world, are more tools on the browsing side. We have a tremendous amount of content flowing through our system, all in these little chunks that are separate from their sites. It should be easy to index and aggregate and present to people in all kinds of different ways."

The dangers of this, of course, are obvious: web-hosting companies have quickly run into trouble in the past when they've attempted to seize the rights to re-use their customers' content. And Williams is quick to agree that users would not condone him publishing their work. What he is interested in is tackling the largely unconnected network of weblogs, introducing network publishing to make it easier for the reader to get to things that might be of interest.

"For instance," he says, "at MacWorld there were lots of bloggers attending. If someone wanted to find out what was happening at the show, they would have to read the traditional trade magazines, and maybe the blogs of the people they know are there.

"But they won't read the tons of other stuff that is going through Blogger which might be interesting or relevant because they're not reading those people's blogs.

"So what if someone who takes the meta approach to this said: 'Give me all the MacWorld stuff, I'll edit it and pull out the best,' with the publishers' permission, of course? Most of them are publishing to get read, and it's another way to get their stuff out there.

"It's the collective intelligence factor that you see a little bit of in the blogging world, but which I think isn't exploited nearly as much as it could be. It's the next exciting phase."